Brandon Shimoda tells ongoing story of WWII Japanese American incarceration

Brandon Shimoda is the author of several books of poetry and prose, most recently “The Afterlife Is Letting Go” (City Lights, 2024) and “Hydra Medusa” (Nightboat Books, 2023). With Brynn Saito, he co-edited “The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration” (Haymarket Books, 2025). He teaches creative writing and Asian American literature at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, where he lives with his partner, the poet Dot Devota, and their daughter Yumi Taguchi.

SunLit: Tell us this book’s backstory – what’s it about and what inspired you to write it? 

Brandon Shimoda: “The Afterlife Is Letting Go” is a panoramic portrait of the ongoing afterlife of Japanese American WWII incarceration: the innumerable ways it continues to exist—in storytelling and silence, memorials and memorialization, literature and art, anti-immigrant legislation and anti-Asian racism, and in the lives of survivors and their descendants. 

UNDERWRITTEN BY

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It is part memoir, part travelogue, part history, part reportage, part cultural criticism, part street festival. I was inspired to write the book because I had family members who were incarcerated during WWII—including my grandfather, who was in a Department of Justice prison under suspicion of being a spy for Japan—but I did not know that when I was young, and did not understand until I was older. That lack of knowledge and the gradual, perpetual process of understanding is where the writing of the book began.

SunLit: Place the excerpt you selected in context. How does it fit into the book as a whole and why did you select it? 

Shimoda: The excerpt I have chosen comes from one of the more autobiographical sections of the book, in which I write about my familial relationship to Japanese American incarceration and how I learned—and also did not learn—about it. It then broadens out to examine redress, including the reparations that were paid to survivors, which was the impetus, within many families, for talking about what had happened.

SunLit: What influences and/or experiences informed the project before you sat down to write? 

Shimoda: One of the most enduring inspirations for “The Afterlife” is a question that Christina Sharpe asks in her book, “In the Wake: On Blackness and Being”: “How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing?” Sharpe asks this question in relation to chattel slavery and its ongoing afterlives (“ongoing and quotidian atrocity,” “the ongoingness of the conditions of capture,” she writes). When I first encountered Sharpe’s question, it struck me, with great force, that life is an unceasing, perhaps neverending memorial to the injustices that we have been miseducated to believe are behind us. 

This is especially true in the United States, where forms of violence are never truly redressed, but are only ever “erased” by being shape-shifted into other forms of violence. And I realized that Japanese American incarceration occupies an important place on that spectrum. “The Afterlife” is, in part, an attempt to answer Sharpe’s question. “The Afterlife” was also influenced by my community: my friends and family, the stories they have told, the stories they are telling, the stories they have yet to tell. 

“The Afterlife is Letting Go”

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SunLit: What did the process of writing this book add to your knowledge and understanding of your craft and/or the subject matter? 

Shimoda: Everything I write (whether a poem, journal entry, essay, letter, book) is an opportunity to learn/relearn how to pay attention: to look more closely, to listen more deeply, to pay attention in new ways. Which also means that everything I write is an opportunity to be more present. 

Writing is, then, for me, an act and a process of mindfulness, which is as difficult in writing as it is in life, but which, for me, often only happens because of writing. I learned a tremendous amount—I learned everything—from the hundreds of people I interviewed (through conversations, correspondence, phone calls, Zoom calls, a questionnaire, over meals, etc.), so much of which does not appear in the book, but forms an indispensable part of its consciousness 

SunLit: What were the biggest challenges you faced in writing this book? 

Shimoda: Because the book is about the legacies of Japanese American incarceration, it is about structural/state violence, which is, of course, an inexhaustibly present subject. There were so many moments throughout the writing of this book in which a social or political or racial or cultural crisis would strike, and I would feel an obligation to write about it, to incorporate it in some way into the narrative, which was an overwhelming, somewhat insurmountable feeling. 

If I covered everything that came up, including all of the innumerable things related, directly or indirectly, to JA incarceration, I would still be writing the book, and it would not, anyway, be a book anyone would want to read, especially me. I was constantly reminding myself of something Dionne Brand wrote: “I try to tell him, you don’t write about racism, you write about life. It is life you must write about.” 

SunLit: What do you want readers to take from this book? 

Shimoda: I hope three things for my book: that it inspires readers to reflect on their own familial/ancestral histories; that it provokes readers to pay attention to and help fight injustice in the present; and more simply, that readers enjoy the experience. 

SunLit: Tell us about your next project. I am working on a book of creative nonfiction: a memoir in three long essays. The essays take place in: childhood, Hiroshima, the Swiss Alps. I am also working on a collection of poetry, titled “Rest House,” which is named after the tourist information center in the Peace Park in Hiroshima, which is located directly across the river from where the atomic bomb detonated.

A few more quick items

Currently on your nightstand for recreational reading: André Dao, “Anam.” “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” “Conversations with James Baldwin,” eds. Fred Standley and Louis Pratt. “Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry,” eds. George Abraham and Noor Hindi. “The Song in the Dream of the Hermit: Selections from the Kanginshu,” translated from the Japanese by Yasuhiko Moriguchi and David Jenkins.

First book you remember really making an impression on you as a kid: The Encyclopedia Britannica. My parents bought a set, many volumes, from a door-to-door salesman, sometime in the 1980s. They invited the salesman in; we sat around the table while he explained the virtues of the encyclopedia. I used it for school reports, etc. but then I developed a relationship with it outside of research. It was mysterious, magical, electrifying.  

Best writing advice you’ve ever received: The Lebanese poet/artist Etel Adnan told me once to “keep your head where it wants to be, with good angels, in wonderful silence.”

Favorite fictional literary character: The woman from Kōbō Abe’s “The Woman in the Dunes”

Digital, print or audio – favorite medium to consume literature: Print

One book you’ve read multiple times: I’m currently reading Jessica Au’s “Cold Enough for Snow” for the third time.

Other than writing utensils, one thing you must have within reach when you write: Orange soda or lemon soda

Best antidote for writer’s block: Raking (leaves, rocks)

Most valuable beta reader: My partner, Dot Devota (she’s also a writer)